Home Made Icepack, Home Made Heatpack

For those weekend warriors out there who might have overdone it....

Home Made Ice Pack
Got a boo-boo and need to ice it? We've all seen those gel cold packs you put in the freezer. Easier than ice becasue it stays pliable. Instead of buying one, make your own. Fill a ziplock bag with dish soap and freeze it! It remains pliable and cold for quite some time. Keep a couple in the freezer....

Home made Heat Pack
Looking for heat instead of cold? Fill a sock with rice and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds to a minute (or until it reaches the desired heat level). It holds heat incredibly well.

Complete Guide to Rechargable Batteries

There are different types of batteries used in electronics, such as lead acid, nickel-base, and lithium ion. Each battery is different in some way, and so that means we have to treat/charge them differently. Let's talk about three of them that are quite common.

Lead acid batteries are mainly found in vehicles like cars, golf carts, and the like. Nickel-based (aka Nickel-Cadmium) can be found in small electronics/toys and other equipment. Lithium ion is probably the most common, which you'll usually find in laptop batteries, phones, etc.

First charge

• Lead acid: The battery should be fully charge. Apply a top-off charge before using.
• Nickel-based: Charge the battery 14-16 hours before the first use.
• Lithium Ion: Apply a top-off charge before the first use.

Full vs. partial charge

• Lead acid: You must always give this battery a full charge, as a partial charge can create sulfation.
• Nickel-base: A partial charge is good.
• Lithium Ion: A partial charge is actually better than full charge.

Full discharge

• Lead acid: A deep discharge can damage the battery.
• Nickel-base: Apply scheduled discharges only to prevent the battery from retaining memory.
• Lithium Ion: A deep discharge can damage the battery.

Battery calibration (for making sure the battery measurement is accurate)

• Lead acid: Not applicable.
• Nickel-base: Apply a discharge/charge when the fuel gauge becomes inaccurate. Repeat every 1-3 months.
• Lithium Ion: Apply a discharge/charge when the fuel gauge becomes inaccurate. Repeat every 1-3 months.

Device on / use while charging

• Lead acid: It’s okay to have device on when charging.
• Nickel-base: It’s always best to turn the device off during a charge, since a parasitic load can either alter full-charge detection, overcharge the battery, and/or cause mini-cycles.
• Lithium Ion: It’s always best to turn the device off during a charge, since a parasitic load can either alter full-charge detection, overcharge the battery, and/or cause mini-cycles.

Unplugging when fully charged

• Lead acid: This depends on the charger. If the charger has correct float voltage, then it’s fine.
• Nickel-base: Always remove your device after a few days in the charger.
• Lithium Ion: This is unnecessary, because the charger turns off.

Temperature

• Lead acid: It creates a slow charge from 32-113 degrees Fahrenheit / fast charge from 41-113 degrees Fahrenheit / the threshold is lowered above 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Nickel-base: It creates a slow charge from 32-113 degrees Fahrenheit / fast charge from 41-113 degrees Fahrenheit / the battery will not fully charge when it’s hot.
• Lithium Ion: Do not charge below freezing. Do not charge when above 122 degrees Fahrenheit.

So... 

• Letting the battery run out before charging extends battery life (not necessary for lead acid/lithium ion batteries, but only occasional full discharges for nickel based ones)
• Uncharged batteries become damaged over time
• For lithium ion batteries, it's best not to have the battery level too low too often.
• Leaving a device plugged in is bad for the battery (this is only bad for nickel-based batteries.)

A Simple Explanation of Existentialism

There is the general sense that if you look at life, really just look at what's available to your senses and your intellect, you start to get this uncanny feeling that something weird is going on. Events aren't connected. Not every choice you make has a meaningful consequence.

We all seem to be very alone within ourselves, even when we're with other people, we can never really commune with them in a way that's really satisfying. Try looking straight into someone's eyes. If you really stare, what you find is that you can't look straight into their mind/soul/consciousness. Instead you start to notice these layers; you looking at them, them looking at you, you noticing them looking at you, them noticing you noticing them looking at you, you noticing that you've noticed them noticing you looking at them.... Anyway your bodies can touch, your gazes can meet, you can be as close as you want, but you'll always be two separate people trying to make sense of each other.

When you're alone what you notice is that if you look at the objects around you, start to see that these objects hold no inherent meaning.

When you really look at things and try to see them for what they are, you get the sense that the world around you is just this grey muck of indifference. The materials and objects around you don't care about you or your life. Your car won't try to keep working because it likes you, it's just a hunk of metal machined by humans that will run until it doesn't run, and that's that. It won't remember your birthday, it won't wait to break down until a convenient time for you, it will just break when it breaks and that can be any time at all.

But when you look at your car, you don't see a hunk of metal slowly falling back into a state of nature, you see a lot more. That's because the car has meaning to you, meaning which you assign to it yourself. You can be reminded of how excited you were when you first got it, you might think of kissing a pretty girl in the back seat, you might be comforted by the way it smells or be reminded of memories when you see the little scratches on the bumper from that time you hit that sign. Your consciousness assembles the sum of your experience with this car and puts it in a special place in your mind: This car isn't just a thing, it is something to you.

And that's really the trick of it. The person you love is someone to you, and you are someone to them. The person that you are for them is different than the person you are to yourself.

And who are you to yourself?

To yourself, you are something other than what you are. Yes, your identity, too, is assembled by your consciousness as a way of making your experiences and actions continuous and meaningful, not because you are that way on any essential level, but because that's what your brain does. It generates meaning.

What does that imply? Whatever god you prefer is generated by you and whatever community you worship with as a means of experiencing continuity in life and (perhaps vainly) through death. However a person seems to be, in your opinion, is generally not the way they really are, but the way you make sense of their behavior. Your opinions of objects, events, people, and society are all generated by your brain in order to make sense of them in a way that is continuous and comprehensible.

So what does it all mean? Here's where it gets better: it means whatever you want!

You have the power to change your opinions, choose your beliefs, and alter the meaning of your entire world. The old adage is that 'a depressed man lives in a depressed world'. In an existential sense, this is quite literal. The world around you doesn't have an opinion as to whether it ought to be depressed or happy, there are only blades of grass which sway when you blow on them, and a breeze which sways you along with the grass.

And so if you really get into existentialism, your mind becomes a paintbrush, and you can paint over the grey muck with whatever is most pleasing to you. You can make a world that is beautiful, one that is logical, one that smacks of a divine presence, one that is quirky and random, one that is fun, whatever you want!

You might seek to strip away all the irrelevant and invented meanings in your life in the hopes of seeing just how weird, random, and indifferent the world really is. This choice is open to you, but be careful. Your brain is built to generate meaning, and if you try to arrive at some true sense of what the world actually is outside of your version of it, you might get a little freaked.

Instead, maybe listen to a fellow like Camus and try to find a way to make it work for you. Or not, it's your choice after all, and that's the fun!

Original Reddit post by ThisisDangeruss

War on Terror vs War on Communism

Nothing is so irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a grave danger that was subsequently coped with. -- George Will.

Reddit's demographic skews young, and people here don't often have the experience to be able to compare the modern "war on terror" to the "war on communism." The truth of the matter is that the war on terror is largely a peripheral concern in the United States, to a degree that Americans between, say, 1950 and 1989 would have loved to have. (As an aside, this is not to say that terrorism wasn't happening during the exact same period -- airplane hijackings in particular were relatively common during this forty-year period, and the thought process that developed on how to handle them played its own sad role on 9/11 -- just that it didn't filter to American cultural consciousness in a way that the "Soviet threat" did.) Yes, you see it on the nightly news, and yes, comedians make jokes about it and it informs both public and foreign policy -- but not to anywhere near the extent that communism did.

What the Americans saw: The USSR was, for at least a portion of its history, an aggressively expansionist and often foul-tempered entity with a largely opaque political process, a history of "disappearing" dissidents, and a united cadre of communist nations to back it up. Or at least, that was the American political establishment's experience with it. With the opening of the Soviet archives, we know a lot more now about the disagreements and infighting behind the scenes, and that what we thought of as being an unstoppable and belligerent empire was anything but. The Soviets didn't really want to go to war any more than we did (of course, exceptions existed on both sides), and each nation thought of the other as having all its ducks in a row and a united set of allies. Nope. Disagreements between the Soviets and Chinese over what to do about North Korea are pretty representative of stuff the Americans didn't know. It turns out the Soviets were no fools about what Kim il-Sung was up to and that they spent a lot of time trying to rein the crazy in. It didn't work and they sorely regretted having put him (and others around the world) in power, in much the same way that the Americans came to regret having supported their own batch of crazies in the interests of countering communism.

Not as crazy as it looks: This all looks insane with the benefit of 20+ years' worth of hindsight, but -- the more you study the era and how politicians on both side acted and why they did, the more you start to understand that, given the insanity of the time itself, just about all parties involved were actually behaving pretty rationally. The Soviets and Americans both behaved in a manner that made perfect sense for how their nations saw the world and their place in it. Or, to put it another way, look at the game theory governing mutual assured destruction. The idea of mass war with nuclear weapons is insane, but how people thought through it, and in essence, designed a system to prevent it, was actually pretty smart. Also smart was how quickly people on both sides recognized that the world was changing. I love to cite this article from 1989 as an example of the almost creepy prescience with which the U.S. military accurately predicted what it'd be doing today.

The Cold War's effect on the American perspective:

• Think about a forty year national nightmare with Soviet spies in the American nuclear program, nuclear weapons being moved to Cuba and within easy range of the continental United States (probably the closest the two countries came to all-out war before Khrushchev blinked), the "space race," and dick-swinging contests over Olympic athletes and scientific and cultural accomplishments.
• Think about Dead Hand and the rivers of ink spilled by commenters, academics, and polemicists for forty years about the potential for a Soviet-American War and what it would look like.
• Think about the German army's bald admission that it existed largely for the purpose of slowing the Soviet tank advance in the event of an invasion of western Europe.

It was something rather more all-consuming than the current "war on terror." The modern CIA owes its existence to the USSR, as do generations of American politicians and policymakers. Condoleeza Rice, for example, is fluent in Russian, as are many in the State Department around her age. There's been a mass scramble to reorient the CIA around Chinese, Dari, Pashto, and Arabic lately. Hint, hint.

The world as a whole is safer and less violent than it's ever been, to a degree I think very few people truly appreciate. And if you want my honest opinion, future historians will see the modern "war on terror" as an inevitable development of the post-colonial world. They, too, will be writing in a period where that threat has passed and people are largely insensible to why it informed politics and culture the way it did. We are already starting to forget why the Cold War was as scary as it was.

Original comment by Cenodoxus

IT Haikus

Clueless user wants,
the Office Paperclip back,
What is wrong with you?

Your server froze up,
kiss your documents goodbye,
next time run backup.

System infection,
Russian FakeAlert virus,
stop downloading porn.

Don't complain to me,
your system is ten years old,
I can't fix cheapness.

Client wants update,
Tech did not fill out ticket,
Need a crystal ball.

Internet is slow,
Somebody running torrent,
Fess up you bastard.

Tell you to restart,
You power cycle the screen,
Palm strikes face so hard.

To use Linux comp,
Requires savvy user,
They do not exist.

Want to go home soon,
Whoops, server just went fubar,
Another late night.

New linux install
Graphics driver, no bueno
You check back next year

Linux, Mac, Windows,
All well designed OSes,
End users, not really.

12 gigs to upload,
Comcast upstream is horseshit,
Moving to Japan.

Help desk is evil,
Those from outside cannot know,
Madness lies within.

Six AM, phone rings,
I can fake being awake,
Cannot fake happy.

Building a server,
Every part arrives on time,
Unless it's crucial.

Phone won't stop ringing,
Tickets like a waterfall,
Smash router, silence.

Call up MS tech,
Seven hours on the phone,
Ear is falling off.

Original Reddit post by debaucherawr

17 Hacks to Make Your Life Easier

1. Take 5-10 minutes each day tidying up while at the same making sure to put whatever it was you were using back where it was. It's not difficult and keeps the place clutter free
2. Keys always goes in the same place, every time. No more lost keys.
3. Coin jar keeps coins from being nomadic.
4. Books go on bookshelf, CDs go in CD tower, Pictures go on wall/desk/shelf.
5. If you don't have a desk/shelf, keep an eye out for those things at the dumpter area of an apartment complex, people throw good furniture away monthly. Its sad really.
6. It takes 5 minutes to make the bed in the morning, faster after having done it for a while.
7. Wash your sheets regularly.
8. Put dirty clothes in dirty clothes bag/hamper. Wash them once a week, hang freshly clean clothes in closet (I hate folding so I just hang them ALL up.)
9. Remove the plates/cups from room daily, place in sink, wash dishes daily (takes 2-3 minutes to wash them if done daily, seriously) One or two dishes is easier/faster to do than a week's worth.
10. Vacuum/sweep daily, this keeps dust from collecting on surfaces as quickly. Also dust about once a month.
11. USE A TRASHCAN AND EMPTY IT WHEN IT GETS FULL. (Note this only works if you actually place unwanted boxes, bags, half-eaten food, fast food refuse, etc. in the trashcan) Please recycle if at all possible.
12. If you want to get fancy, you can get a small file cabinet for 30-40 bucks at Target or something. Get folders, I found a labelmaker at Staples for 10 bucks, and organize your documents/mail. You could have categories like: Rent receipts, bank statements, utility bills, credit card bills, taxes, school records, job-search, car maintenance, and other. I keep a paper shredder next to mine so when I sort my mail I can shred the unimportant stuff like credit card offers.
13. Credit card offers: DO NOT ACCEPT THEM. Only keep one credit card handy FOR EMERGENCY PURPOSES. Not being able to get McDonald's one day is not an emergency. Something like: Holy shit my only means of transporting myself to work/school needs $500 worth of repairs...
14. Speaking of McDonald's, minimize fast food consumption, you'll gain alot more in the long term if you make attempts to cook for yourself. Get a cookbook. You'll end up saving money, learning to cook, and eating a better diet.
15. Shop at thrift stores where you can find really nice furniture, appliances, and clothing and really low prices. Buy used and refurbished. I rarely ever buy anything new anymore.
16. Never buy a new car, its a waste of money to buy new, stay away from dealerships. Look for somebody selling their car, ask to drive it around the block, take it to a shop and pay them $20-$50 to inspect it. Tell them you're thinking about buying it and ask them for advice. ALL used cars will have some sort of problem requiring repair. If you're planning on spending $1200 for a car, then $800-$900 should be for the car and the rest for repairing immediate issues. Don't focus on the cosmetics, instead make your purchase based on the car's mechanical condition. Yes, I've found great cars for $800 and less.
17. After getting a car, go to a car parts store and get the repair manual for that model. Often, stuff like replacing the brakes, fuel filter, oil changes, exhaust repair, battery replacement, etc. is insanely easy to do. Older cars from the 90s and early 2000s are much easier to work on than new models since manufacturers now like to design it so you MUST go to their authorized service center to get it something simple done. My friend has a new car where the freakin battery has a support bar over the top of it so it can only be removed at a shop.

Original post by psychopete

Found Some Cool T-Shirts

I'm not a raging liberal, but I'm certainly no fan of Bush and the administration that's driven this country into the ground over the last 8 years. If pressed, I'd profess to be a humanist. The short version: I believe there's enough for everybody, violence and hate are counter-productive and demean those who perpetrate it, we should be better care-takers of our planet, and we worry to much about stuff and not enough about each other.

So I'm poking around the web the other day, as I am wont to do, and I found some T-Shirts in CafePress store that express a lot of the values I hold. The store is called ClosingTagTees, and whomever created it found a unique way to present a variety of social statements; using code syntax.

Take for example </mccain>, which, as anyone who's ever written code knows, means 'end mccain'. I thought it a pretty succinct way of expressing one's opinion. Given my chosen profession, it stuck a particular affinity in me and I thought it quite clever.

CafePress prices, IMO, are a bit high, but I'm going to pick up </mccain> and maybe one or two others, like </hate> and </war>. is too trite....

Maybe one day the opinions expressed by these shirts will actually be realty, though given human history and nature, I doubt it.